In dialogue

The more ancient European cultures evolved the concept of individuality, the more the idea of dialogic wisdom gained ground.

It is a cultural historical fact that no great ideas were ever developed by a single mind, regardless of how strongly we may feel about crediting a single individual with it.

The cultural march forward depended and still depends on dialogue. On putting human minds in dialogic intercourse with each other.

Some cognitive scientists even argue that we may have evolved to pursue dialogic rather than monologic rationality. That the survival of the species depended on distributed cognition, the reduction of individual cognitive labor and the pursuit of collective intelligence. In other words, we can’t do anything on our very own, whether in personal or evolutionary time.

Traditional societies thrive on myth and the creation, sharing and reproduction of cultural capital through cognitive connectivity. Modern societies do exactly the same, through the mediation of technologies, both psychological, like literacy and numeracy, and material, like knowledge and information processing tools.

We may write and read in solitude, but the conditions which make these two activities possible depend on collective projects, like language, script, book production and information storage.

And the simplest tool we use is dialogue.